No Eagles this week, but we can still pick on the FOX pregame guys. A Wall Street Journal study finds they laugh precisely 11.6% of their time on-air: [WSJ.com]

The amount of time they laugh, though, is what sets them apart. The five hosts on Fox’s show—Curt Menefee, Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, Michael Strahan and Jimmy Johnson—had a combined laughing time of two minutes, 22 seconds. That’s about 11.6% of the 20 minutes, 27 seconds they were shown on set together. Mr. Bradshaw was easily the laughing leader, going for about 92.4 seconds—including 2.5 seconds at the start of the show before anyone said anything.

The CBS crew—Greg Gumbel, Dan Marino, Bill Cowher, Shannon Sharpe and Boomer Esiason—only laughed for 43 seconds. That’s about one-third as much chuckling as the group at Fox. CBS declined to comment. Fox Sports spokesman Lou D’Ermilio says, “If we didn’t tell the guys to stop they would laugh and crack jokes 100% of the time.

1 Comment

I don’t know what the big deal about FOX is. I am glad that FOX covers the NFC. Except for the overused and often odd robots that appear, FOX is entertaining to me. I find CBS to be melodramtic and boring. Then you have NBC, which has been out of the sports game for so long, they clearly don’t really know what to do and try way too hard. I do have to saw though that their HD flyovers of cities are pretty beautiful.